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Alex Himelfarb on Our Weakening of the Collective

Alex Himelfarb, Former Clerk of the Privy Council

Interviewed on June 23, 2014 by Adam Kahane.

Kahane: What keeps you up at night?

Himelfarb: The number one issue for me is inequality. Let’s think of the bottom, middle, and top of society. On the bottom, even if, as some argue, over the past few years things aren’t necessarily getting worse, they aren’t improving and certainly not at the rate that we see in many other rich countries. Compared to other rich countries, we’re doing badly, and on First Nations and Aboriginal issues and on child poverty, unforgivably badly. Most troubling, we are moving in the wrong direction. Austerity at every level of government—largely self-imposed through years of unaffordable tax cuts—has eroded our key redistributive institutions, which are welfare and employment insurance, and continues to squeeze the programs that mitigate the consequences of inequality, including Medicare. Austerity has yielded a kind of trickle-down meanness. Its consequences inevitably fall hardest on the most vulnerable. Just think of recent policies that seek to deprive refugee claimants of needed medical care or social assistance. And how is it that we always find money for war but cannot find the resources to serve our veterans well? The list is long and the direction is wrong.

The middle class is also unquestionably stretched. Two things mask the extent of the problem. First, over the last decade, women have worked more hours than before, so many households have not actually fallen in income, although people are working longer to stay in place. The second thing is petro jobs. The oil-rich provinces have done pretty well for some working-class folks, because they have relatively high-paid jobs, but this success is regionally focused and fragile. And even in Alberta, inequality is high; the benefits are unevenly spread. Mostly our labour market performance has been shabby, wages have not kept pace with productivity gains and only barely with inflation, and more and more Canadians (especially young Canadians) are finding themselves with precarious jobs, with no security, benefits, or prospects, and high levels of debt. So you’ve got significant middle-class problems that, if unattended, are just going to get worse. But because we have all these headlines about how well we’re doing compared to the US (which has, among rich countries, the most serious inequality problems), you can’t get any traction on it. Many, especially in my age group, have done pretty well—which no doubt is another reason for the dangerous level of complacency.

Then at the top, we have witnessed the very rich getting very much richer. Capital always talks louder than labour—that’s why it’s called “capitalism” and not “labourism”—but now the bargaining power of capital is through the roof. So money talks louder than ever.

Kahane: What is the impact of this growing inequality on our society?

Himelfarb: Extreme inequality is corrosive. When the people at the top and the people at the bottom are breathing such different air, it’s hard to imagine them finding any common interest or shared purpose. When people at the top are so rich that they can decide they no longer need public services, they effectively secede from society. When the gap is extreme, they also seem to believe they somehow deserve all they have. Hence trickle-down meanness. If they don’t need the services and deserve their wealth, why pay taxes? People at the bottom start to think that the game is fixed, and there’s nothing in it for them. They don’t want to vote and they too don’t want to pay taxes. Why pay or play when the game is rigged?

Kahane: Does government have a role to play in countering these problems?

Himelfarb: We have had 30 years of an assault on government. The right’s greatest success has been to redefine taxes as a burden or punishment and an unjustifiable constraint on our freedom, and to equate government with inefficiency and corruption. For decades we’ve heard that our main problem is the size of government. Is the problem climate change? No, the problem is the size of government. Is the problem inequality? No, the problem is the size of government. And the solution is to make government smaller. That’s a conjurer’s trick! That’s a distraction! And it has worked profoundly. Of course government has to be made better, but that won’t happen so long as the very idea of government is seen as the problem.

The biggest impact of austerity is that it stunts the political imagination; it makes it seem like nothing’s possible collectively. Each of us is on our own. So I see not only this invisible, incremental, hard-to-talk-about growth in inequality, but also the loss of the collective capacity to do anything about it.

Kahane: But doesn’t our weakened trust in one another make it harder for us to act collectively?

Himelfarb: One of the reasons that our institutions, including our political institutions, are so important is that, as former Prime Minister Trudeau observed, Canada is an act of defiance. Canada makes no sense: we are dispersed geographically; we have a terrible climate; we have two official languages and many non-official; we have no revolutionary moment that is binding; we are a country of great cultural and regional diversity. For all these reasons, we have to work at being Canada. And when we lose trust in our government and in each other, it weakens us.

From 1870 to 1996, more than 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children were placed in residential schools and forbidden to speak their language and practice their culture. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) estimates there are 80,000 former students living today, and that the ongoing impact of residential schools are a major contributor to challenges facing modern Aboriginal populations.

Canada’s TRC is one of many commissions worldwide to undertake revealing and resolving past wrongdoings, mostly by governments. Other examples include:

South Africa

In 1996, President Nelson Mandela authorized a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to study the effects of apartheid in South Africa. The commission allowed victims of human rights violations to give statements about their experiences, but also allowed perpetrators of violence to request amnesty from criminal prosecution.

Argentina

The National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, initiated in 1983, investigated human rights violations, including 30,000 forced disappearances, committed during the Dirty War.

Guatemala

The Historical Clarification Commission was created in 1994 in an effort to reconcile Guatemala after a 36-year civil war. The commission issued a report in 1999 which estimated that more 200,000 people were killed or disappeared as a result of the conflict.

In June, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission released 94 “calls to action” to “redress the legacy of residential schools and advance the process of Canadian reconciliation.”

The scope of recommendations range from child welfare to education to Indigenous language rights, and has recommendations targeted for private and public spheres of Canadian life alike. The document calls upon law schools in Canada to require all students to take a course in Aboriginal people and the law, for example. Notably, the document calls upon the federal government to appoint a public inquiry into the causes of, and remedies for, the disproportionate victimization of Aboriginal women and girls.

Canada’s employment statistics are much better now than they were 20 years ago. In 2012 for example, 61.8% of working-age Canadians were employed as opposed to 58.7% in 1995. The unemployment rate has gone down from 9.5% in 1995 to 6.8% in 2014. Youth unemployment has gone down too, from 16.1% to 13.5% in the same time period. The outlier in these trends is labour force participation, or the amount of working-age Canadians who are either employed, or unemployed and looking for work. Right now, participation is at the lowest rate since the year 2000, mainly because the “baby-boomer” generation is moving towards retirement. Read more about that here.

Housing preferences among Millennials, however, tend towards smaller, higher density housing close to activities, signs that changing economic realities and the generation shift will create more demand for housing in compact, walkable neighbourhoods.

Belfry-Munroe suspects that youth disinterest has to do with political parties. “There’s been a lack of engagement one-on-one with people since the 1970s, and a greater focus on mass media and now things like social media,” says Belfry-Munroe. “The other thing is that parties have become uncool,” she continues, “and I think that getting excited about the election without parties is like getting excited about the World Series without the teams. If you weren’t excited about the Blue Jays, you would not be concerned about the World Series.”

To extend this analogy, young Canadians currently aren’t even interested in baseball. What could work to change this would be getting other types of fans — soccer, golf, darts, you name it — engaged in baseball due to their passion for sports in general. Politically, this is the bridge that is missing for youth. The Blue Jays don’t matter if youth are removed from sports. Similarly, political parties and leaders would have little relevance if youth are removed from electoral politics.

“The generational effect is even larger [than the life cycle effect]. At the same age, turnout is 3 or 4 points lower among baby boomers than it was among pre-baby boomers, 10 points lower among generation X than it was among baby boomers, and another 10 points lower among the most recent generation than it was among generation X at the same age.”

— An excerpt from “Why Was Turnout So Low?” in Anatomy of a Liberal Victory by Andre Blais, Elisabeth Gidengil, Richard Nadeau and Neil Nevitte.

Rock The Vote also published a Youth Voter Strategy Report in 2007 that compiled many scholarly findings on this subject. You can find that here.

According to Elections Canada, “people are less likely to cast a ballot if they feel they have no influence over government actions, do not feel voting is an essential civic act, or do not feel the election is competitive enough to make their votes matter to the outcome, either at the national or the local constituency level.” Read more here.

The trend of youth voter disengagement persists across much of the developed world. According to the Economist, for example, in 2010 just 44 per cent of people aged 18 to 24 voted in Britain’s general election compared to 76% of those aged 65 and over. America saw its lowest voter turnout ever in its 2014 midterm elections, where just 19.9 per cent of young people voted, compared to an overall turnout rate of 36.4 per cent. This trend tends to change, however, when charismatic politicians reach out to youth. According to Politico, Barack Obama would have lost the 2012 American presidential election without youth voting — overwhelmingly for him. Read more here.